Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Aug 30, 2006 23:41

"In the future, in the wind, in the dark on the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, Brandy Alexander, that brand-name queen supreme that she is, Brandy comes out to Seth and I with souvenirs of the future. These are postcards. Brandy Alexander gives us each a stack of postcards so faded and dog-eared and picked over and ignored that they've survived in the back of a revolving wire rack for years. Here are pictures of the future with clean, sun-bleached skies behind an opening-day Space Needle. Jackie O pick mohair suits with three huge cloth-covered buttons down the front. Children in striped T-shirts and blonde astronaut crewcuts run through a Science Center where all the fountains still work.
"Tell the world what scared you the most," says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says, "Save the world with some advice from the future."
Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.
On game shows, Brandy reads, some peope will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.
Brandy puts a Plumbago kiss on the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.
Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
A kiss, and the card's on its way toward Lake Washington.
From Seth:
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
A kiss, and it's off on the wind toward Ballard.
Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound laned are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:
I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.
Brandy is waiting to take the card and read it out loud. Brandy's waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don't give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don't have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net.
While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net, Brandy reads another card from Seth.
We are all self-composting.
I write on another card from the future, and Brandy reads it.
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
An updraft lifts my worst fears from the suicide net and sails them away.
Seth writes and Brandy reads.
You have to keep recycling yourself.
I write and Brandy reads.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.
I write and Brandy reads.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

Give me denial
Flash
Give me another chance.
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